Fall From Grace (15 page)

Aspects and images.

Margaret Bouch, her tongue outstretched to catch the falling drip. And swallow it down.

Jean Brash at the window, red hair against the white skin of her naked shoulders as Oliver Garvie delved in.

How long had McLevy sat on that wall looking at the finally closed curtain?

Not long. His backside had become too damp and he hoped the result would not be investigational haemorrhoids.

If an entanglement it was none of his business but what if there was more to it than that?

There was certainly not less. It was obviously a full-blooded affair, red in tooth and claw.

He reviewed the case so far, but was conscious that there was an element of avoidance in the process; two women, one close to hand, the other through a glass. McLevy did not delude himself that he was unaware of how love could rage.

He was by no means an innocent but had always taken his satisfaction in other cities, never close to hand.

And as regards love, he had never brought it home.

The prospect was terrifying. To lose yourself in another person. To lose yourself. Like madness.

Perhaps he would write of this later in his diary. A confidence, between himself and the page.

Meanwhile, back to the certainty of crime.

The night of the fire, the watchman had been absent and when he and Mulholland went a’ visiting, the man’s wife informed them that he had a fever. Sure enough the fellow lay in bed sweating and pallid but that could have been downright fear.

While Mulholland distracted the woman, McLevy ducked in to the scullery for a quick snoop, and spotted, shoved to the back of a shelf, a near-full bottle of whisky. Fine quality at that.

Medicinal, the wife said when challenged, and she aye bought fine quality.

Her clothes and the furnishings of the two cramped rooms, three children sleeping next door, would seem to contradict that but short of dragging the man from his sickbed and hauling him to the station, an act that though tempting might be hard to justify to his Lieutenant Roach should the accused collapse and die leaving his snottery offspring fatherless, McLevy had to leave it there.

He would be back though, he said, and fixed the trembling man with a baleful stare but the wife was unimpressed.

They had nothing to hide. Why pick on poor folk?

But she was wrong there; McLevy would pick on anybody plus, if they were that impoverished, how afford the whisky?

And the watchman’s absence was very convenient. The inspector did not cleave to convenience. Or coincidence.

He wondered for a moment how Mulholland was faring with old Mary Rough. The constable had probably given up long ago and was standing underneath Emily Forbes’ window serenading her like a smitten Sicilian.

The inspector moved towards the faint-glowing fireplace where his coffee pot stood on the hearth. As he poured out into his stone mug, he glanced in and frowned to see the network of cracks running along the interior; he’d be losing precious coffee to those cracks.

He’d arrived too late for supper so had to make do with his own bread, cheese and pickle. The bread was three days old, the cheese ten, and the pickle time out of mind.

This was his second cup of bituminous coffee, reduced to what looked like a black sludge. It would go well with the pickle.

McLevy looked around his room and sighed contentedly. Save for the books, it bore little trace of the person within and that was just how he liked it.

Two battered armchairs, one with a broken spring for guests who never arrived, a couple of thin stringy carpets that had seen better days and the spindly-legged table which served for meals and scribbling.

The whole place maintained clean as a whistle by his landlady, Mrs MacPherson.

Not a mirror, not a photograph to mar the looping whorls of brown flowers on the faded wallpaper.

Of late he had, to his surprise, become increasingly shipshape, not that it reflected in how he presented himself to the outside world, but in this room everything was kept in its place.

Even his beloved books were arranged in neat piles, the spines facing outwards for easy identification, stacked up against the brown wallpaper, some of the towers reaching up to almost waist height. He played a childlike game where he imagined them to be like columns of a temple and took great pleasure in favouring one then another in terms of how high they might aspire.

His reading was voracious, eclectic, and he relished the retention of obscure facts and strange turns of phrase from literature or poetry.

Such are the ways of the solitary man.

A scratching at the window intruded upon these reflections and an indignant yowl claimed his attention.

A visitor.

He walked over, reached across the table to raise the sash window and the black shape of Bathsheba ghosted in to make at once for two chipped saucers near to the fire containing, respectively, a recently poured ladle of milk and some leftover scraps of cheese and pickle.

The cat dived into the cheese, sniffed in suspicion at the pickle before dismissing it altogether, then moved over to lap with some rapidity at the milk.

It always struck McLevy that the intake of liquid on such an occasion was out of proportion to the lingual exertion involved, but he was not of the feline species.

He waited patiently until Bathsheba emptied the saucer and then watched her jump up to the hearth where McLevy had arranged an old torn red semmit, far enough from the meagre flames not to catch a spark but sufficiently near to absorb some warmth.

One of the armchairs, the one without the broken spring, was set before the ingle and McLevy sat down to regard the animal thoughtfully.

She would rest for about half an hour and then be on her way, over the rooftops to a world he could only wonder over, where yellow eyes gleamed in the night and various small birds and rodents found their own world abruptly terminated.

A time before Bathsheba had obviously been pregnant, some dirty old tom had pinned her to the slates. It had been her first litter but he had never seen trace of offspring and did not like to dwell upon their fate.

Now, she was returned her svelte queenly self.

‘What kind of mother are you?’ he suddenly demanded. ‘Did ye drop the poor wee buggers off the roof?’

The cat yawned and buried her head into the fur near to her tail.

McLevy rested back his own cranium, noted a damp patch on the ceiling and frowned.

In the morning he would call on a banker who owed him a favour and who also knew more about the financial dealings in Edinburgh than any man alive. The information McLevy sought as regards Oliver Garvie would be confidential but the pastime the banker wished to keep hidden from the world was also a clandestine matter.

He closed his eyes and drifted.

Secrets everywhere.   

19

I was a little stranger, which at my entrance into

the world was saluted and surrounded by

innumerable joys. My knowledge was divine.

THOMAS TRAHERNE,
Centuries of Meditations

As Mulholland almost galloped through the damp streets, his mind raced with the probabilities of glory. A golden future.

Emily in adoration trembling as the ring was fixed upon her finger and the organ swelled. Mrs Roach tears in her eyes, the lieutenant waggling the stripes of promotion discreetly by his side, Robert Forbes beaming proudly at his newly adjusted son-in-law, and McLevy, nose out of joint at a case cracked in his absence, skulking at the back of the church, knowing that time was not on his side and the younger man was coming through.

On the rails. The old horse tiring, the thoroughbred sweeping past with nary a backward glance, or maybe a small compassionate flick of the eyes, then kick the turf, great clods of earth spraying all over the lumbering beast behind, as it headed towards the knackers yard!

From these thoughts, it is not difficult to observe that the constable was getting a mite beyond himself.

This exhilaration prompted Mulholland to laugh aloud as he forded the puddles of East Claremont Street, causing a respectable couple coming towards him to quicken their pace past, and a young nymph of the pavé, the girl could not have been more than Emily’s age, to sniff a potential joker on the ran-dan and hiss quietly from one of the wynds,

‘In here my mannie, warm and cosy, like a robin’s nest.’

She must be new on the bones not to recognise him even in his civilian clothes but Mulholland had no time to lay out the dangers of the life she led, no time to fix her with a piercing glance so that she felt the weight of authority, not his lustful body, pressing upon her.

The constable waved a hand; palm outstretched like a holy saint warding off temptation, and strode on through the faint glimmering light of the street lamps.

The girl watched his figure disappearing into the gloom and sighed. A cold damp night, her feet soaking wet, and not a randie-boy in sight. Still, not long till the taverns emptied and she might yet make a catch.

She took out a small mirror and gazed at her face in reflection. No sign of the pox. But you could rarely tell from countenance who did or did not possess such.

Men cursed and called it
cuntbitten
, women suffered the same and called the raspberry-like scabs
grandgore
.

She’d had unprotected congress with a baker’s apprentice the night before, no sheath to hand, and hoped the young man was clean-living.

But if he was so, what was he doing with her?

She giggled like a child at that. He had promised her a puggy bun, her favourite, a treacle sponge mixture inside a pastry case, on their next mounting and maybe he’d be her regular and after that, who knows?

So wished-for affection overcomes bitter experience to kindle hope in the human heart.

But she was also a practical girl and looked after the departed Mulholland with a sense of regret.

Thought she had a chance there, it’s not often you see a man with such a smile on his face.

Not often.

The constable meanwhile was still bound for glory and the New Town, in the shape of Doune Terrace just below Moray Place where Oliver Garvie had his residence.

An elegant façade where rich folk could look down on the lowly worms crawling through the streets. Well we’d see about the worms, eh?

He had worked his way through the back roads and now was coming around Royal Terrace, close to his destiny, and as he walked along he suddenly skipped up into the air like a demented giraffe as his mind replayed that last exchange with Mary Rough.

The old woman, all mirth and merriment gone, levelled her gaze at Mulholland who cradled the wooden box in his hands. The constable had found a little stool to perch upon where he sat like some sort of giant insect, because he did not want to be towering over Mary.

No. Sympathy was the key.

A long silence. Then finally she spoke. Resigned.

‘He was drunk that night. I went along tae try and keep control. Some hope, eh?’

So even now she denied complicity, just a loving mother with a rambunctious son. Well, he’d let her off with such for the moment.

That’s what McLevy would have thought and it had some merit but Mulholland would soon fly above him. High into the clouds, with wings of gold. Higher and higher.

‘What was the plan?’ he asked softly.

‘He was tae fire the place. Daniel said nobody would be there tae stop us. Guaranteed.’

‘Guaranteed, eh?’

‘That’s whit he said.’

She fell silent again and Mulholland resisted the temptation to follow that line of questioning which could be revisited later. The absent watchman could wait. Gently does it, and always remember she was a Catholic. Faith is the key, even a ruptured disreputable faith like hers.

‘The Lord loves a penitent, Mary,’ he murmured.

‘So, he does,’ the old woman conceded.

She looked at the box he held as if it contained, like Pandora’s, all of the inflictive evils.

‘Daniel was molassed wi’ drink. He ripped open a case, threw that thing at me. I didnae even know I had it till I got hame. I ran terrified. Whit I could see in my mind. My poor wee lamb.’

‘So you hid the box away?’

‘Aye. It was all I had left of him. The wee lamb.’

She bowed her head once more and though Mulholland knew the man’s reputation as an unmitigated thug, he nodded as if he had personally witnessed Daniel gambolling in the fields, covered in a woolly fleece, bleating like a soul possessed.

‘What happened to him? Your wee boy?’

Mary’s eyes creased with pain. She was a wily old bird, a born survivor, and no doubt, in time, would try to wriggle off the hook, but at that moment her face held such a depth of suffering that Mulholland almost found it difficult to meet her gaze.

Almost.

‘What transpired that night, Mary?’ he repeated.

‘Daniel, he – bent over tae light the shavings. Fell on his face. The oil must have splashed all over him. He went up like Bonfire Night.’

For a moment her lips twisted in grim humour and Mulholland judged it time to make his move. On to what really mattered, never mind the burnt lambkin.

‘He was to fire the place, you said?’

‘Aye.’

Deep breath now.

‘Who put him up to it, Mary?’

‘A fine gentleman.’

If Mulholland had breathed in any more, he would have bloated up like a bullfrog.